The media, propaganda and the war (disclaimer)1
Last updated: June 18, 2024
To focus the discussion this section will examine Israeli and American media as well as other actions of the Israeli state to limit public discourse.
Introduction: propaganda, sometimes known as public diplomacy, aims to disseminate information to influence public perception. Such propaganda may convey facts, lies or anything in between. States and other actors in the 21st century commonly employ propaganda. The propaganda of the Israeli state is often called hasbara (lit. “explaining”).2
Context: Scholars have argued for decades that despite the large quantities of information to which we are exposed, most individuals extract only a little of this information, and even less knowledge and understanding.3 The result of this process has been labeled already in the 1990s as “the destruction of political intelligence” due to the manipulations of modern media.3 This section assumes that the information conveyed by state, non-state and media actors is biased, but is also not completely reliable or unreliable by definition. Rather, these actors author and disseminate information that fits within their different interests (e.g. political, economical or ideological). The main problem is not “fake news” – but rather the fact that much of the information conveyed is used out of context and weaponized to further these interests, leading to misinformation and disinformation.4To better evaluate the reliability of the information that different voices disseminate one must employ critical reading and thinking, alongside a careful consideration of the source of information.
Part of Israel’s propaganda is institutionalized through the state apparatus.5 Israel is unique among self-defined western democracies in that it has a military censorship (see also below), which requires by law that any article about security issues must be first submitted to it.6 When the censor intervenes in an article, the media outlet cannot convey that information to readers (for example by blacklining excised content).7 Israel’s Prime Minister has pressured the chief censor of the IDF to intervene in additional cases, including cases without a security justification.8 In a similar case, a website without formal affiliation that was created by the Israeli Ministry of Hasbara and aimed at international consumption had been blocked from access within Israel.9
The state of Israel has been buying positive coverage in international media since 2018, claiming that many other countries have been doing the same.10 A long list of local politicians and government offices have been doing the same in national media.11 Government offices have sometimes used contracts that allow them to veto the content of the positive coverage that they had bought.10 Already in 2017, the Israeli government had invested tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of shekels (likely tens of millions of dollars) to create a network of organizations through which it could relay its propaganda messaging, originally directed against the de-legitimization of Israel and the BDS movement.12 Unlike traditional and direct propaganda, this propaganda is conducted through civic organizations rather than governmental ones, and the association with the state is hidden from the consumers (and sometimes also the civic organization itself).13 The Israeli government had worked with hundreds of these organizations and likely maintains these connections.14 Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry, for example, oversees several firms that are supposed to carry out such operations to avoid entangling Israel in a diplomatic crisis.15 In January 2024, Israel acquired a technological system for mass influence that can create content suitable for online influence operations and began using it.16 In additional to state-led efforts, several start-up companies have attempted to influence discourse on their own both before and during the war.17
Outside Israel, many established media outlets whitewash Israel using different means and methods. A former media worker in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recounted how any reporting on Palestine faced major difficulties, including the cancellation of interviews, allowing the repetition of verifiably false pro-Israel claims on air, refusing to have discussions about difficult issues from Israel’s perspective (e.g. whether a genocide might be happening), not providing key context to current events (e.g. the situation pre-Oct. 7), editing out controversial material (e.g. references to genocide and starvation), adding disclaimers about the un-verifiable nature of even personal statements (e.g. the deaths of interviewees’ extended family members), removal of names and contact information of Palestinian speakers from internal databases, and ignoring genocidal statements by Israeli officials. 18 This was at least partially related to complaint campaigns by right-wing lobby groups, which produced a chilling effect.18 Some of the influence on media comes from powerful business elites. A group of these elites discussed a plan to spend some $50 million on a media campaign that was supposed to frame Hamas as a terrorist organization among Americans.19
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Following a pattern from earlier wars in Gaza,20 the current war has been enabled and facilitated by massive media efforts21 to shape discourse in Israel as well as in the West – in countries such as the United States, Canada,18 the United Kingdom and Germany22. Israel maintains a powerful hold over media attention, particularly in the US. The Intercept, for example, has highlighted how Israel repeatedly “chooses an issue and demands global attention to its agenda at the expense of any other matter”.23 Israel’s information warfare strategy has focused on four efforts: (1) emphasize the horrors of the Oct. 7 events; (2) discredit critical voices; (3) limit the flow of information about the conflict coming out of Gaza; and (4) rally the Israeli public by advertising its military prowess and the destruction of Gaza.24 The chief aim of this campaign was to legitimize the massive Israeli attacks against Gaza. The following four sections of this document expand on each of these four efforts.
Emphasizing the horrors of the Oct. 7 attacks
Immediately after Oct. 7 Israel began a massive advertisement campaign to emphasize the horrors of the Hamas massacre.21 One examination of the evidence found that in the first ten days, Israel “flood[ed]” social media with at least 70 ads, including graphic videos, to millions. About 30 ads were completely removed from Google’s public library because of the violent images they contained.25 A different review found that in less than two weeks, Israel targeted audiences in Western Europe in particular with some 88 ads, spending $7.1 million to reach nearly a billion impressions.26 In at least six European countries, pro-Israel ads including disturbing content were used in advertisements in family-oriented video games, where they were watched by children.27 In the first month of the war, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ digital team estimated they had reached 2 billion people.21 On Facebook and Instagram alone, US pro-Israel organizations spent over $2.2 million on online ads by December, spending 100 times more than pro-Palestinian groups.28 An Israeli NGO revealed in a report that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ran a $2M pro-Israel covert campaign that included three new media outlets and hundreds of Twitter profiles to target Democrat congressmen/women and senators from the US (predominantly Black) in attempt to a sway their opinion on Hamas crimes on Oct. 7 (especially sexual crimes) as well as UNRWA (see below for a detailed discussion of the UNRWA discourse).29
Despite the real horrors of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, Israeli officials repeatedly shared content that was soon disproved as unreliable or outright fake.30 Most Israeli media chose not to inform the public that these stories had been refuted.31 In a conversation with US President Joe Biden, the Israeli Prime Minister himself has stated falsehoods such as that Hamas “took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them.”32 His wife wrote to Jill Biden a story about a hostage held by Hamas who gave birth in Gaza, a story supported by the Israeli state and media that was subsequently proved as fake.33 The IDF accepted and claimed to have verified evidence of beheaded babies, later found out to be false.34 Other stories such as putting a baby in the oven or cutting a baby out of his mother’s belly and stabbing it, were all promoted by the media and/or the IDF, yet found out to be fake as well.35 Israeli officials such as Israel’s Minister of Economy continued to repeat these falsified stories in international interviews at least as late as April.36
A university researcher that was tasked with investigating rapes on Oct. 7 by Israel was chosen to receive the prestigious Israel Prize for her work, even though she never published the report for which she received the prize, featured fake evidence in her messaging, and was strongly criticized by Israeli state employees who cast serious doubts on her methodology and refused to collaborate with her.37 Other stories during the war, such as the Israeli claim that the central Hamas bunker is located under al-Shifa hospital, were found to be false (see also the discussion of the flour massacre above).38
Discrediting critical voices outside Israel
Israel also discredited critical voices. One tactic to do so was by claims of antisemitism, a tactic Israel has used for many years.39 When Amnesty International claimed war crimes were conducted by both sides in late October, Israel attacked it as antisemitic.40 Israel and its media attacked climate activist Greta Thunberg who called for a ceasefire in Gaza in late October, while an IDF spokesperson stated that “whoever identifies with Greta in any way in the future, in my view, is a terror supporter” (he later apologized).41 Greta was subsequently removed from the Ministry of Education’s materials in Israel.42 Supporters of a ceasefire in Gaza in November were smeared as “pro-Hamas” or “pro-Palestinians” in both Israel and the US.43 Israeli officials accused photographers who worked for foreign outlets on Oct. 7 of working for Hamas, describing them as terrorists – even as no evidence was produced to support the claims and the media watchdog who made the allegations walked them back.44 A Human Rights Watch report found more than a thousand cases of the removal or censorship of pro-Palestinian content written in 60 countries on Facebook and Instagram. In a systematic examination of all this content, all but one contained content defined as “peaceful”. In parallel, only a single case of removal of pro-Israeli content was found (according to HRW, the ratio is not necessarily representative). One of the four cited reasons for the removal of content was a direct request by the Israeli state.45
When the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan decided to announce his intention to seek arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and Secretary of Defense in May, Israel’s Prime Minister described Khan as taking his place “among the great antisemites in modern times” and compared him to judges in Nazi Germany who denied Jews basic rights and enabled the Holocaust, while his decision was “a moral outrage of historic proportions”.46 To place this harsh criticism in context, Khan was Israel’s preferred candidate for the position back in 2021.47 Israel’s Prime Minister also described the issue of warrants as “an antisemitic hate crime”.48 A joint investigative report by the Guardian and +972 Magazine/Local Call found that Israel conducted a long covert operation against the ICC in attempt to sway its officials and Khan’s predecessor from investigating Israel’s war crimes and issuing arrest warrants to Israeli officials.49 Some of the details were known to an Israeli journalist in 2022, but as he worked on the story he was threatened by two senior officials in Israel’s military apparatus, and did not proceed with publishing those details.50
Limiting information flow from Gaza
Israel attempts to control media reporting on Israel in support of its own propaganda. To date, Israel has not allowed international reporters to enter the Gaza Strip independently, limiting the world’s ability to witness the true cost of the war,51 and hindering investigations of atrocities within the Strip such as the “flour massacre”.52 As discussed above, Israel attempts to prevent Gazan journalists from reporting on events from Gaza, including by threatening their lives and the lives of their families. In another example, the IDF’s censor declared early in the war a ban on reporting on 8 subjects without approving them first. This censorship applies to Israeli journalists and their foreign counterparts, who have to sign a document that they will comply with the censor to get a visa as a journalist in the country.53 CNN, for example, has admitted that it runs all its Gaza coverage through its Jerusalem bureau, itself monitored by the censor.54 Israeli media, especially during the beginning of the war, stressed repeatedly that their coverage had passed military censorship, thus creating an atmosphere that strongly promoted self-censorship as well.55 Already in December, Israeli researchers declared that the media was becoming a propaganda arm of the government.55 In 2023, the Israeli censors prevented the publication of 613 articles (almost four times as many as in 2022) and intervened in the text of 2,703 articles (almost three times as many in 2022).56 In total, the censors intervened in 31% of the articles sent to it.56 In late May, Israel seized the equipment of the Associated Press that was putting out a live video feed of Gaza, and returned it only as a result of American pressure.57 In June, after the successful IDF operation to release four Israeli hostages, an anchor on Israeli TV acknowledged that they “cannot show” a video clip of the results of the operation in the Nuseriat refugee camp, in which the IDF killed some 274 Gazans and injured hundreds more.58
Rallying the Israeli public around the war
To rally the Israeli public around the war, Israel strongly limits the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Israeli police has been repressing anti-war protests since the beginning of the war, often with excessive violence.59 In late March, the police entered the house of an anti-government activist who was suspected of coloring a fountain’s water red, trashing her place,60 while also using excessive force to disperse a demonstration that claimed that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza”, claiming that such statements “disturb the public peace”.61 In another demonstration the police prohibited reading the names of dead Gazans and confiscated both the microphone and the pages with the list of their names.62 In April, the police showed up in a 75 year-old protestor’s home and beat him to prevent him from using a cardboard tank in an anti-government protest.63 The Minister for National Security established a police team to track and remove human rights activists from the West Bank.64 The police has repeatedly seized and shredded signs with anti-war messages held in “a long list of demonstrations and vigils”.65 The Israeli Prime Minister’s office did not allow the father of one of the Israelis killed on Oct. 7 to say a short prayer in a memorial ceremony associated with the state based on an earlier op-ed he wrote that was critical against the Prime Minister.66 The Israeli Channel 12 decided to minimize attention to protests by the families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza against the government.67 In June it was revealed that an elite police unit was tasked with disrupting anti-government or pro-hostage release protests in Jerusalem.68
Palestinian citizens of Israel were not allowed to protest early during the war with the support of Israel’s Supreme Court,69 a situation that has only partially improved subsequently.70 Freedom of speech, particularly among Palestinian citizens of Israel, has been curtailed significantly.71 A poll found that 76% of Palestinian Israelis stopped publishing content on social media in the first two months of the war, and 63% of Palestinian Israelis did not express their opinions at all in mixed Jewish-Palestinian groups on social media.72 Israel has attempted to pressure Palestinian journalists from the West Bank from publishing about the war.73 In early April Israel passed a law to shut down the operations of the critical channel Al-Jazeera in the country.74 After some deliberation, the government decided to shut down the channel in early May, sending police to immediately raid some of its local offices.75 Also in May, an Israeli teacher who attended “a pro Palestinian demonstration” with “Palestinian flags” in Israel (a Nakba commemoration) she was immediately suspended from teaching in her school.76 In the same month, the University of Haifa forbade a student demonstration against the war in its area,77 and when a Palestinian citizen of Israel who owns a beauty salon expressed her sadness and solidarity with Rafah victims, she was arrested, zip-tied and blindfolded.78 A Palestinian-Israeli TV host who wrote a social media post critiquing the release of one of the Israeli hostages in June at the price of so many dead Gazan civilians was immediately fired from her job.79
In addition, Israeli media has revealed that the IDF has conducted a covert campaign aimed at influencing Israeli citizens during the beginning of the war. As part of this campaign, the military opened and operated a Telegram channel that shared exclusive explicit content from IDF sources that showed the abuse and dehumanization of Palestinians, mostly within a Gaza context.80 In a more subtle case of media manipulation, the IDF edited out the thanks a released hostage’s father expressed to US President Biden, leaving only his gratitude towards the IDF.81
The deeper discussion of Israeli media and discourse in the next two sections highlights the success of Israel’s attempts to rally the Israeli public.
Israeli media and discourse
Following the above, Israeli journalists cannot get independent access to the Gaza Strip or to Gazans. The entire connection between Israeli journalists and the war is moderated through the IDF. One journalist summarized things as such: “if there is something that the military does not want us [journalists] to see and hear – we will not see it and not hear it. The IDF prevents us, Israeli journalists, any contact with Palestinians in the Strip… all the articles and images coming out of the Strip with journalists undergo a careful examination of the military censorship. This article was also changed by it. Most entrances of journalists to the Strip are very short… about half an hour on the ground… Sometimes it seems that the IDF stages scenes with more military action for those journalists it wishes to reward”.82
Israeli discourse almost uniformly ignores Palestinian voices. Even before the war, only 4% of interviews or screen time featured Palestinian-Israelis (about 20% of the population), a number that dropped after the beginning of the war.83 Instead, the dominant perspective provided to the Israeli public is the official account of the IDF’s spokesperson which is rarely challenged despite many examples of falsehoods and misrepresentations of reality by the IDF in the war.84 For example, despite Israeli claims to have killed large amounts of Hamas militants (10,000-13,000 as of late February-early March),85 the number has not been challenged in Israeli media, while a BBC examination found almost no evidence for this in hundreds of IDF videos, and little support for the number in the IDF’s own reporting.86 For several months, the IDF spokesperson presented the IDF’s perspective on prime time every day on all Israeli TV channels with little criticism.55
There is almost no attention in Israeli media to the experiences of civilians in Gaza or the horrors of war.87 Destruction, when showed, is sanitized through images of buildings destroyed from far away.55 Nonetheless, in April a poll found that two thirds of Israeli Jews saw few or no pictures or videos about the widespread destruction in Gaza.88 For example, the dozens of civilians deaths caused by the military operation that released two hostages in February were barely covered in Israeli media.89 Most Israeli media has not covered the atrocities and war crimes conducted by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, and the ones that have done so did it only months after the beginning of the war.90 The main challenges to dominant Israeli narrative in Hebrew language discourse come from independent media such as +972 Magazine/Local Call and The Seventh Eye, which nonetheless have very limited reach and resources91 and are themselves under military censorship92 as well as NGOs such as B’Tselem and Gisha.93
Israeli media also minimizes the coverage of reports by international institutions, as the common assumption that the media promotes is that these institutions are inherently biased against Israel. For example, 60% of Jewish Israelis believed that the ICC was planning to issue warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense because of the “continued anti-Israeli bias of the ICC”.94 In this context, Israel has obstructed external official investigations into the Oct. 7 atrocities, for example one led by the UN Human Rights Council,95 and another that aimed to investigate sexual violence on Oct. 7.96 When these reports were published, they received little attention in Israeli media, which often focused on discrediting them.
Israeli’s media’s uncritical pro-war position
Israeli media’s pro-war position is rationalized, justified and widely accepted. Already before the war, many Israeli journalists intentionally shifted their coverage to the right or self-censored in recent years.83 The new CEO of Channel 13 told his employees in mid-March that they should unite the nation by providing entertainment and Israeli hasbara (i.e. public diplomacy/propaganda).97 An important Israeli journalist has stated that he believes that journalism should be used to bolster Israeli morale during the war.98 Accordingly, Israeli media amplifies pro-war voices – seen to support the state’s goals – while silencing others. Especially early in the war, Israeli journalists avoided reporting on friendly fire casualties in the IDF.99
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (considered to be leftist by Israeli standards), for example, waited for five months until it called for a ceasefire,100 despite overwhelming evidence for the humanitarian costs of the war, widespread acknowledgement that the Israeli Prime Minister was prolonging the war for his own personal interests, and the apparent inability of the IDF to reach its military objectives. Similarly, it waited for almost half a year before speaking against the real possibility of ethnic cleansing in Gaza,101 and published only in late March a piece covering a report that estimates excess mortality in Gaza because of famine and disease, which had been published originally in mid February.102 An important journalist in the newspaper flipped his own position without any admission of his earlier mistake.103 In another example, when an Israeli director won a prize for a film and discussed Israeli apartheid in his victory speech, the Israeli Channel 11 described it as antisemitic104 while Ha’aretz featured no less than four pieces against him.105 A Palestinian citizen of Israel who wrote an op-ed in the newspaper was not allowed to use the term ‘Palestinian’ to refer to Israeli citizens – and the editorial staff changed it to the socially acceptable ‘Arabs’.106
Israeli media continued to disseminate claims that had already been debunked. A serious investigative program on Channel 12 broadcasted an interview with a senior IDF general who claimed to have seen atrocities that did not happen.107 The Israeli Channel 14 has presented especially egregious examples of promoting fake news and reiterating false claims. In one case, for example, a popular anchor discussed in depth a supposed The Atlantic piece about the events of Oct. 7, aiming to absolve the Israeli Prime Minister from responsibility. A brief subsequent investigation revealed that the Atlantic piece never existed.108 In a different case the channel televised an interview with an IDF officer who openly lied about atrocities in the Gaza envelope well after those atrocities had been shown to be false in Israeli media.109 On other occasions, Israeli media casts doubts on evidence that weaken Israel’s legitimacy. For example, in late March Channel 11 broadcasted a segment under the title “Is there a famine in Gaza?”,110 while the popular news website Ynet uncritically conveyed an official response that “there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza” and blamed the UN for any problems in the distribution of food in Gaza.111
American media
In American media, several studies and experts have pointed out that there has been a pervasive bias against Palestinians for a century.112 For example, a survey of the American media’s coverage of Palestinians found that only a tiny minority (less than 2%) of editorials, columns and guest opinion pieces that discussed Palestine in the New York Times and Washington Post (between 1970-2019) were written by Palestinians.113 The media coverage of the beginning of the war remained strongly pro-Israeli.114 A Newsweek editor, for example, called for large parts of Gaza to be flattened to resemble a parking lot.115 The New York Times supplied direct quotes from Israeli government and military officials four times as much as the equivalent Palestinian quotes.116 In another example, an investigation by The Guardian demonstrated that CNN’s coverage is heavily biased towards Israel,117 a critique that surfaced within the channel as well.118 Similarly, a study by The Intercept found that already early in the war, the coverage of Palestinians in top newspapers in the United States decreased as the number of Palestinian deaths increased. Strong emotional words were disproportionally used to describe Israeli deaths and not Palestinian ones.119 A different investigation found a similar effect continuing throughout February in The New York Times.116 A third investigation found that until March the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal used the term ‘brutal’ far more often to refer to Palestinians and their actions (77% of cases) than Israel despite the lopsided death toll between both sides.120 An internal memo at The New York Times told journalists to avoid terms such as “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, “occupied territories”, “refugee camps” or “Palestine” in its coverage of the war.121 Similar editorial guidelines at the global news syndicate AFP were similarly pro-Israeli.122
While Israeli casualties are individuated in reporting, the far greater number of Palestinian casualties is frequently described collectively and in passive terms.123 An examination of 5 leading media outlets reveals how Palestinians are dehumanized and often reduced to numbers, which are then doubted.124 The selection of language to blur Israeli responsibility, for example to the killing of Palestinians, and preserve its image has been long documented and continues throughout the war.125 As a result, for example, a February poll found that half of Americans do not know whether Israelis or Palestinians have had a higher death toll, despite the massive discrepancy in reality between both sides (about 20 Palestinians had been killed for each Israeli).126 The New York Times published an editorial in which it recognized that military aid to Israel cannot be unconditional only after more than half a year of war.127
American media has also largely avoided investigations of events that could make Israel appear negatively. As at least some of these investigations, especially those concerning the events on Oct. 7, have been covered in Israeli media, it appears that this is an explicit pattern that corresponds with the decisions of the political class in the US. The media watchdog group FAIR pointed out that US media shields its audience from reports of Israeli friendly fire incidents in the Oct. 7 attacks – reports that had been widely in Israeli media.128 Notably, Ronen Bergman, a journalist working for both the Israeli Yediot Ahronot and The New York Times, has investigated these incidents in his Yediot Ahronot publications but not in his New York Times ones.129 The New York Times has briefly or not covered other negative stories on Israel such as Israel’s targeting policy, its responsibility in starving Palestinians, or its torturing of detainees.130 Instead, a major story covering Hamas’ mass rape during Oct. 7 in The New York Times received inordinate resources – including the funding to conduct 150 interviews131 – and was solicited by the paper itself. Inexplicably, the story was given to a former Israeli intelligence officer with no former reporting experience, who also liked a tweet that called upon Israel to “turn the [Gaza] strip into a slaughterhouse”.132 After its release, independent media as well as The Intercept found a long list of fundamental problems with the account.133 The New York Times itself had to admit that some of the information it had published was false,134 and later cut its ties with the reporter.135 The Nation described the piece as “the biggest failure of journalism” at the Times in the past two decades,136 while Ha’aretz compared the collapse of the Times’ piece to its October 7.137 In late April, 59 journalism and news media professors from top universities called upon the New York Times to address open questions about the piece.138 Despite all these questions, in early May the New York Times received a Pulitzer in international reporting for its coverage of the Israel-Gaza war.139
The treatment of UNRWA as a case of media misrepresentation
One example of the actions of Israel’s media strategy is the treatment of UNRWA, the UN body responsible for the support of Palestinian refugees. The same day after the ICJ found that it was plausible that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza (Jan. 26), Israel asserted that 12 UNRWA employees (out of c. 13,000 in the Strip) participated in the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel.140 Almost immediately, 16 of UNRWA’s donors – western countries – declared they would suspend their funding of UNRWA.141 Israeli and Western media followed the UNRWA story with coverage and discussions, burying the much more substantial ICJ story. Although Israel has not released any publicly available evidence to support these claims to date,142 a story in the British Channel 4 revealed the document Israel supposedly sent UNRWA’s donor countries. The document itself was extremely brief. Containing no actual evidence, it includes a single line about each of the 12 UNRWA employees that were supposed perpetrators.143 A different intelligence dossier released by Israel contains no evidence either.144 To date, the head of UNRWA has stated that despite multiple requests Israel has not shared any details of the allegation with him or his organization.145 Other claims made by Israel were never made to UNRWA but directly to the media.146 An assessment by the US’ national intelligence council assessed the involvement of a handful of UNRWA workers in the Oct. 7 events “with low confidence”.147 The weak evidence supporting the Israeli claim has led to several of the countries that stopped funding to resume it in March and April.148 Other countries did so subsequently or expressed plans to do so, and some even increased their humanitarian support for Gaza.149 In mid-March, the EU’s top humanitarian aid officer said that he had seen no evidence from Israel that supported Israel’s accusations against UNRWA.150 According to UNRWA’s own leaked report, Israel pressured Gazan employees of UNRWA to falsely state that UNRWA has links to Hamas and that its staff took part in the Oct. 7 attacks. The employees were severely beaten, tortured and were threatened that their family members would be harmed.151 In late March an Israeli organization released a report that revealed a pro-Israeli influence operation that targeted US Black Democrat legislators, in attempt to sway their opinion against UNRWA and the Palestinians.152 A few months later it was revealed that the operation was orchestrated by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry and run by a political campaigning firm.153 In late April, an independent review by a former French foreign minister and three research institutions mentioned again that the Israeli government has not yet substantiated its claims that UNRWA’s staff has had links to Hamas or Islamic Jihad. It added that UNRWA regularly supplied Israel and other countries with lists of its employees for vetting, and that the Israeli government has not informed UNRWA of any concerns regarding its staff since 2011.154
Israeli officials have long stated that they want to shut UNRWA down.155 Israel has recently stated again this aim,156 and has acted upon it,157 going as far as proposing a bill that designated UNRWA as a terrorist organization in late May.158 These indicate that Israel has been weaponizing its allegations against UNRWA for this purpose.159 In the recent war Israel and Israeli media state or insinuate there is a connection between UNRWA and Hamas, but Israeli media fails to independently evaluate the claims by the IDF, or mention facts such as that UNRWA is very frequently audited within the UN,160 or notify its audience that all UNRWA employees had been approved by Israel and re-approved every year, and that UNRWA screens all its employees against the UN Security Council sanctions list twice a year.161 UNRWA also fired several employees who were found to be linked to Hamas in the past.162 Moreover, the closure of UNRWA would massively exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, while discussions in Israeli media include no clear plan for providing alternative aid to Gazans (polls in late March and late May found that UNRWA oversaw the provision of assistance for 62% and 53%, respectively, of respondents in shelters in south Gaza, in parallel to complaints for discrimination in those shelters163).
Another case of successful propaganda: doubting the Palestinian death toll164
Early during the war, Israel had publicly disputed the Palestinian death toll, claiming that it was exaggerated and unrealistic. Here too the media played a major role in propagating this claim, planting the seeds of doubt in the minds of many. Until today, the media retains these doubts, often by mentioning that Palestinian casualties are reported by, e.g. the “Hamas-led Ministry of Health in Gaza” (emphasis mine). The doubts reached as high as US President Joe Biden, who publicly doubted the number of casualties in a well-covered speech on Oct. 25 in which he stated he had “no confidence” in these numbers.165 The relatively large number of Hebrew-speaking comments responding to an earlier version of this document (released on Twitter/X on 15 March) reveals that these doubts remain in the minds of many in Israel. Superficial doubts of the death count continue to appear periodically in Israeli Hebrew-speaking media as well as strongly pro-Israel think tanks groups.166
Nonetheless, this is an untenable position. Disregarding the obvious interests of Israel to minimize the Palestinian death count, a few days after Biden doubted the Palestinian death count, the health authorities in Gaza released a list of the 6,747 dead Palestinians who had died until Biden’s statement on Oct. 26, including their names, sex, age and IDs.167 To the best of my knowledge, nobody, including Israel who holds the population registry for Gaza, has doubted the veracity of this list.168 Subsequently, Biden himself apologized for casting public doubt on the Palestinian death toll.169 To the best of my knowledge, there have been no explicit doubts of the Palestinian death toll in major international media outlets since that point (despite the repeated insinuations discussed above). The single attempt to do so, a March piece in the conservative Jewish Tablet Magazine, used cherry-picked and partial data to make a statistical argument.170 Although several experts and observers quickly refuted it as a case of shoddy statistics,171 a series of Israeli media outlets (as well as AIPAC) attempted to boost this message without any criticism to sow doubt.172
Another attempt to cast doubt on the Gaza Health Ministry took place in mid May, after the UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs, which publishes summary reports every few days, changed the source of data it used for reporting on the composition of deaths (moving from over 9,500 women deaths and over 14,500 children deaths according to vague estimates by the Gaza Media Office, to more concrete 4,959 identified women, 7,797 identified children, and some 10,000 unidentified deaths according to data by the Gaza Ministry of Health).173 Although the total number of reported casualties did not change, and the identification of individuals by their name and full demographic information represented a step forward in the granularity and reliability of the data coming from Gaza, the media reporting on the issue – which began only several days after the publication of the numbers – mainly served to cast doubt on the reported data as well as the UN (and again this was led by openly pro-Israel media outlets).174 Although the “halving” narrative was soon refuted by the Deputy Spokesperson for the UN’s Secretary-General as well as several media outlets, 175 the information warfare damage has been done.176
The Gaza Health Ministry reported mortality does contain some methodological challenges. The most serious problem is the division of the death count into three separate categories. The first includes reports of mortality through hospitals (20,976, or 61% of the total in the report from May 3). The second includes Gazans own reporting of deaths they know of (3,715, or 11% of the total). Both categories include full demographic information, and people listed in them appear on the Ministry’s lists of mortality (last published on April 30). The third category is currently listed as deaths about which only ‘partial information’ is known (9,963, or 29% of the total). According to earlier reports by the Ministry, these were collected from “reliable media sources” (unclear which) in areas where the Health Ministry has no communications or where the health system has broken down.177
Several serious media outlets have accepted the Gaza death count178 and declared that “the figure is widely viewed as the most reliable one available”.179 In December, a peer-reviewed scholarly analysis in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet has argued that there was “no evidence of inflated mortality” in the reports from Gaza.180 The Gaza Health Ministry has provided reports of deaths to several media outlets, for example to al-Jazeera (a list of several thousand children who were identified as killed, published)181 and to NPR (a report on the death count, unpublished).179 In mid March, an expert epidemiologist with 30 years of experience in field measurement of mortality in crises accepted the number, adding that “In fact, there may have never been a major conflict where real-time surveillance data about deaths was more complete than is unfolding in Gaza today.”178 In late April, both a UN official and IDF military officials agreed that the number is reliable.182
Notably, the recent war has been the first major Gaza operation in which Israel does not keep its own estimates of the Palestinian death count. To the best of my knowledge, there is no other source for mortality in Gaza as of writing.183 An Israeli investigative journalist report revealed that the IDF itself is using the official Gaza death count, updating it daily in its own internal briefings.184 This has been confirmed by the Wall Street Journal.185 Israel’s Prime Minister himself has claimed in an interview that Israel has killed 13,000 Hamas militants (see below on this number) and that 1-1.5 civilians died for each militant, indicating a total Palestinian death count of 26,000-32,500 as of March 10.186 This range includes the Palestinian death count the next day, 31,112.187 In late March, in a closed briefing to Senate Republicans, Israel’s Prime Minister reiterated his position, stating that he estimated the death toll to be some 28,000 (about 14% lower than the official Gaza Health Ministry estimate on the next day, 32,623).188 In late April, IDF officials estimated that the death toll was around 36,000 (the Ministry estimate was more than 34,000).189 In early May, Israel’s Prime Minister estimated a total death toll of about 30,000 (again about 14% less than the Ministry’s estimate, 35,091).190
Additional evidence supporting the Palestinian death count claims include the fact that in previous wars, the gap between the Israeli and Palestinian versions of the Palestinian death tolls have been negligible. Thus for example, for the 2014 Operation Protective Edge, Israel officially estimated 2,125 Palestinian deaths191 whereas the Palestinian Ministry of Health counted 2,310 Palestinian deaths192 (the UN Human Rights Committee’s count reached 2,251193). The reported number of Palestinian deaths is probably an undercount as it is likely that many deaths have not been found or have not been reported to the health ministry.194 The death toll does not include more than 10,000 people missing under the rubble.195 Gaza’s own electronic system for counting the dead was disrupted already on Nov. 12.179 By April there were clear indications that the Ministry was unable to reach many of the dead.182
Estimates of Hamas militant deaths by Israelis are often exaggerated, as is natural and unsurprising in military engagements on both sides.196 On other occasions, Israeli officials have long produced wild exaggerations with regards to the number of killed Hamas militants. On November 5, for example, “a senior security official” (perhaps the Minister of Defense), stated that the IDF has already killed 20,000 Gazans, “mostly terrorists”.197 The overall Palestinian count back then was only 9,770.198 The exaggerations on the Israeli side have been strongly suggested, for example, by a BBC fact checking analysis of all IDF videos.199
Altogether, all the evidence strongly suggests that the Palestinian death counts are as precise as might be expected during a war, even more so considering the serious and sustained damage to the Gaza health system and its reports. The fact that a significant amount of interested commentators continues to doubt the reports and is willing to do so publicly highlights both the effectiveness of the propaganda campaign during the beginning of the war, and the tenacity of Israel’s information war that continues to be waged as of writing.